DU dust may kill Americans and children overseas;

Depleted Uranium Dust May Kill Americans–and Children Overseas

DU May be Causing Global Contamination

There are those who believe that the widespread use of Depleted Uranium in weaponry is creating a cloud of low-level (but hazardous) radioactive particles around the world, causing a global epidemic of diabetes and cancer. (DU is used by the US and British military in coating tanks and shells.) One article on the global contamination theory is here: The Queen’s Death Star. And here’s the LATEST development:

They were told depleted uranium was not hazardous. Now, 23 years after a US arms plant closed, workers and residents have cancer - and experts say their suffering shows the use of such weapons may be a war crime. It is 50 years since Tony Ciarfello and his friends used the yard of a depleted uranium weapons factory as their playground in Colonie, a suburb of Albany in upstate New York state. . .Today there are lumps on Ciarfello’s chest - strange, round tumours that protrude about an inch.

‘No one seems to know what they are,’

he says.

‘I’ve also had a brain aneurysm caused by a suspected tumour. I’m constantly fatigued and for years I’ve had terrible pains, deep inside my leg bones. I fall over without warning and I’ve got a heart condition.’

Ciarfello’s illnesses have rendered him unable to work for years. Aged 57 and a father of five, he looks much older.

In a paper to be published in the next issue of the scientific journal Science of the Total Environment, a team led by Professor Randall Parrish of Leicester University reports the results of a three-year study of Colonie, funded by Britain’s Ministry of Defence.

Parrish’s team has found that DU contamination, which remains radioactive for millions of years, is in effect impossible to eradicate, not only from the environment but also from the bodies of humans. Twenty-three years after production ceased they tested the urine of five former workers. All are still contaminated with DU. . .

TV footage shot in Baghdad in 2003 shows children playing in the remains of tanks coated with thick, black DU oxide, while there have long been claims that the DU shells that destroyed Saddam Hussein’s tanks in the 1991 Gulf war were responsible for high rates of cancer in places such as Basra.

For a general article on DU see Nukes of the Gulf War by John Shirley.